During the two hundred years between 1400
and 1600, Europe witnessed an astonishing revival of drawing, fine art
painting, sculpture and architecture centred on Italy, which we now refer
to as the Renaissance (rinascimento). It was given this name (French
for 'rebirth') as a result of La Renaissance - a famous volume
of history written by the historian Jules
Michelet (1798-1874) in 1855 - and was better understood after the
publication in 1860 of the landmark book "The Civilization of the
Renaissance in Italy" (Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien),
by Jacob Burckhardt (1818-97),
Professor of Art History at the University of Basel.

In very simple terms, the Italian
Renaissance re-established Western art according to the principles
of classical Greek art, especially Greek
sculpture and painting, which provided much of the basis for the Grand
Tour, and which remained unchallenged until Pablo Picasso and Cubism.

From the early 14th century, in their search
for a new set of artistic values and a response to the courtly International
Gothic style, Italian artists and thinkers became inspired by the
ideas and forms of ancient Greece and Rome. This was perfectly in tune
with their desire to create a universal, even noble, form of art
which could express the new and more confident mood of the times.

Renaissance Philosophy of Humanism

Above all, Renaissance art was driven by
the new notion of "Humanism," a philosophy which had been the
foundation for many of the achievements (eg. democracy) of pagan ancient
Greece. Humanism downplayed religious and secular dogma and instead attached
the greatest importance to the dignity and worth of the individual.

Detail showing The Son of Man from
The Last Judgement
fresco on the
wall of the Sistine Chapel in Rome,
(1536-41) by Michelangelo. One of
the great works of Biblical art in
the Vatican.

RELIGIOUS ARTS
Despite its humanism, the Italian
Renaissance produced numerous
masterpieces of religious art, in
the form of architectural designs,
altarpieces, sculpture & painting.

Effect of Humanism on Art

In the visual arts, humanism stood for
(1) The emergence of the individual figure, in place of stereotyped, or
symbolic figures. (2) Greater realism and consequent attention to detail,
as reflected in the development of linear perspective and the increasing
realism of human faces and bodies; this new approach helps to explain
why classical sculpture was so revered, and why Byzantine art fell out
of fashion. (3) An emphasis on and promotion of virtuous action: an approach
echoed by the leading art theorist of the Renaissance Leon Battista Alberti
(1404-72) when he declared, "happiness cannot be gained without good
works and just and righteous deeds".

The promotion of virtuous action reflected
the growing idea that man, not fate or God, controlled human destiny,
and was a key reason why history painting (that is, pictures with uplifting
'messages') became regarded as the highest form of painting. Of course,
the exploration of virtue in the visual arts also involved an examination
of vice and human evil.

What caused this rebirth of the visual
arts is still unclear. Although Europe had emerged from the Dark Ages
under Charlemagne (c.800), and had seen the resurgence of the Christian
Church with its 12th/13th-century Gothic
style building program, the 14th century in Europe witnessed several
catastrophic harvests, the Black Death (1346), and a continuing war between
England and France. Hardly ideal conditions for an outburst of creativity,
let alone a sustained rinascita of paintings, drawings, sculptures
and new buildings. Moreover, the Church - the biggest patron of the arts
- was racked with disagreements about spiritual and secular issues.

Increased Prosperity

However, more positive currents were also
evident. In Italy, Venice and Genoa had grown rich on trade with the Orient,
while Florence was a centre of wool, silk and jewellery
art, and was home to the fabulous wealth of the cultured and art-conscious
Medici
family.

Prosperity was also coming to Northern
Europe, as evidenced by the establishment in Germany of the Hanseatic
League of cities. This increasing wealth provided the financial support
for a growing number of commissions of large public and private art projects,
while the trade routes upon which it was based greatly assisted the spread
of ideas and thus contributed to the growth of the movement across the
Continent.

Allied to this spread of ideas, which incidentally
speeded up significantly with the invention of printing, there was an
undoubted sense of impatience at the slow progress of change. After a
thousand years of cultural and intellectual starvation, Europe (and especially
Italy) was anxious for a re-birth.

Weakness of the Church

Paradoxically, the weak position of the
Church gave added momentum to the Renaissance. First, it allowed the spread
of Humanism - which in bygone eras would have been strongly resisted;
second, it prompted later Popes like Pope
Julius II (1503-13) to spend extravagantly on architecture, sculpture
and painting in Rome and in the Vatican (eg. see Vatican
Museums, notably the Sistine
Chapel frescoes) - in order to recapture their lost influence. Their
response to the Reformation (c.1520) - known as the Counter Reformation,
a particularly doctrinal type of Christian
art - continued this process to the end of the sixteenth century.

An Age of Exploration

The Renaissance era in art history parallels
the onset of the great Western age of discovery, during which appeared
a general desire to explore all aspects of nature and the world. European
naval explorers discovered new sea routes, new continents and established
new colonies. In the same way, European architects, sculptors and painters
demonstrated their own desire for new methods and knowledge. According
to the Italian painter, architect, and Renaissance commentator Giorgio
Vasari (1511-74), it was not merely the growing respect for the art
of classical antiquity that drove the Renaissance, but also a growing
desire to study and imitate nature.

Why Did the Renaissance
Start in Italy?

In addition to its status as the richest
trading nation with both Europe and the Orient, Italy was blessed with
a huge repository of classical ruins and artifacts. Examples of Roman
architecture were found in almost every town and city, and Roman sculpture,
including copies of lost sculptures from ancient Greece, had been familiar
for centuries. In addition, the decline of Constantinople - the capital
of the Byzantine Empire - caused many Greek scholars to emigrate to Italy,
bringing with them important texts and knowledge of classical Greek civilization.
All these factors help explain why the Renaissance started in Italy. For
more, see Florentine
Renaissance (1400-90).

For details of how the movement developed
in different Italian cities, see:

If the framework for the Renaissance was
laid by economic, social and political factors, it was the talent of Italian
artists that drove it forward. The most important painters, sculptors,
architects and designers of the Italian Renaissance during the 14th, 15th
and 16th centuries include, in chronological order:

As referred to above, the Italian Renaissance
was noted for four things. (1) A reverent revival of Classical Greek/Roman
art forms and styles; (2) A faith in the nobility of Man (Humanism); (3)
The mastery of illusionistic painting techniques, maximizing 'depth' in
a picture, including: linear perspective, foreshortening
and, later, quadratura; and (4) The naturalistic realism of its
faces and figures, enhanced by oil painting techniques like sfumato.

In Northern Europe, the Renaissance was
characterized by advances in the representation of light though space
and its reflection from different surfaces; and (most visibly) in the
achievement of supreme realism in easel-portraiture and still life. This
was due in part to the fact that most Northern Renaissance artists began
using oil paint in the early 15th century, in preference to tempera
or fresco which (due to climatic and
other reasons) were still the preferred painting methods in Italy. Oil
painting allowed richer colour and, due to its longer drying time,
could be reworked for many weeks, permitting the achievement of finer
detail and greater realism. Oils quickly spread to Italy: first to Venice,
whose damp climate was less suited to tempera, then Florence and Rome.
(See also: Art Movements, Periods,
Schools, for a brief guide to other styles.)

Among other things, this meant that while
Christianity remained the dominant theme or subject for most visual art
of the period, Evangelists, Apostles and members of the Holy Family were
depicted as real people, in real-life postures and poses, expressing real
emotions. At the same time, there was greater use of stories from classical
mythology - showing, for example, icons like Venus the Goddess of Love
- to illustrate the message of Humanism. For more about this, see: Famous
Paintings Analyzed.

As far as plastic art was concerned, Italian
Renaissance Sculpture reflected the primacy of the human figure, notably
the male nude. Both Donatello and Michelangelo relied heavily on the human
body, but used it neither as a vehicle for restless Gothic energy nor
for static Classic nobility, but for deeper spiritual meaning. Two of
the greatest Renaissance sculptures were: David by Donatello (1440-43,
Bargello, Florence) and David
by Michelangelo (1501-4, Academy of Arts Gallery, Florence). Note:
For artists and styles inspired by the arts of classical antiquity, see:
Classicism in Art (800
onwards).

Raised Status of Painters and Sculptors

Up until the Renaissance, painters and
sculptors had been considered merely as skilled workers, not unlike talented
interior decorators. However, in keeping with its aim of producing thoughtful,
classical art, the Italian Renaissance raised the professions of painting
and sculpture to a new level. In the process, prime importance was placed
on 'disegno' - an Italian word whose
literal meaning is 'drawing' but whose sense
incorporates the 'whole design' of a work of art - rather than 'colorito',
the technique of applying coloured paints/pigments. Disegno constituted
the intellectual component of painting and sculpture, which now became
the profession of thinking-artists not decorators. See also: Best
Renaissance Drawings.

Influence on Western Art

The ideas and achievements of both Early
and High Renaissance artists had a huge impact on the painters and sculptors
who followed during the cinquecento
and later, beginning with the Fontainebleau
School (c.1528-1610) in France. Renaissance art theory was officially
taken up and promulgated (alas too rigidly) by all the official academies
of art across Europe, including, notably, the Accademia di San Luca in
Rome, the Accademia del Disegno in Florence, the French Académie
des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and the Royal Academy in London. This theoretical
approach, known as 'academic
art' regulared numerous aspects of fine art. For example, in 1669,
Andre Felibien, Secretary to the French Academy, annunciated a hierarchy
of painting genres, modelled on Renaissance philosophy, as follows: (1)
History Painting; (2) Portrait art; (3) Genre Painting; (4) Landscape;
(5) Still Life.

In short, the main contribution of the
Italian Renaissance to the history of art,
lay in its promotion of classical Greek values. As a result, Western painting
and sculpture developed largely along classical lines. And although modern
artists, from Picasso onwards, have explored new media and art-forms,
the main model for Western art remains Greek Antiquity as interpreted
by the Renaissance.

Renaissance
Chronology

It is customary to classify Italian Renaissance
Art into a number of different but overlapping periods:

The Renaissance, or Rinascimento,
was largely fostered by the post-feudal growth of the independent city,
like that found in Italy and the southern Netherlands. Grown wealthy through
commerce and industry, these cities typically had a democratic organization
of guilds, though political democracy was kept at bay usually by some
rich and powerful individual or family. Good examples include 15th century
Florence - the focus of Italian Renaissance art - and Bruges - one of
the centres of Flemish painting.
They were twin pillars of European trade and finance. Art and as a result
decorative craft flourished: in the Flemish city under the patronage of
the Dukes of Burgundy, the wealthy merchant class and the Church; in Florence
under that of the wealthy Medici family.

In this congenial atmosphere, painters
took an increasing interest in the representation of the visible world
instead of being confined to that exclusive concern with the spirituality
of religion that could only be given visual form in symbols and rigid
conventions. The change, sanctioned by the tastes and liberal attitude
of patrons (including sophisticated churchmen) is already apparent in
Gothic painting of the later Middle Ages, and culminates in what is known
as the International Gothic style of the fourteenth century and the beginning
of the fifteenth. Throughout Europe in France, Flanders, Germany, Italy
and Spain, painters, freed from monastic disciplines, displayed the main
characteristics of this style in the stronger narrative interest of their
religious paintings, the effort
to give more humanity of sentiment and appearance to the Madonna and other
revered images, more individual character to portraiture in general and
to introduce details of landscape, animal and bird life that the painter-monk
of an earlier day would have thought all too mundane. These, it may be
said, were characteristics also of Renaissance painting, but a vital difference
appeared early in the fifteenth century. Such representatives of the International
Gothic as Simone Martini (1285-1344) of the Sienese School of painting,
and the Umbrian-born Gentile da Fabriano (c.1370-1427), were still ruled
by the idea of making an elegant surface design with a bright, unrealistic
pattern of colour. The realistic aim of a succeeding generation involved
the radical step of penetrating through the surface to give a new sense
of space, recession and three-dimensional form.

This decisive advance in realism first
appeared about the same time in Italy and the Netherlands, more specifically
in the work of Masaccio (1401-28) at Florence, and of Jan van Eyck (c.1390-1441)
at Bruges. Masaccio, who was said by Delacroix to have brought about the
greatest revolution that painting had ever known, gave a new impulse to
Early Renaissance
painting in his frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel of Santa Maria del
Carmine.

The figures in these narrative compositions
seemed to stand and move in ambient space; they were modelled with something
of a sculptor's feeling for three dimensions, while gesture and expression
were varied in a way that established not only the different characters
of the persons depicted, but also their interrelation. In this respect
he anticipated the special study of Leonardo in The
Last Supper (1495-98, Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan).

Though Van Eyck also created a new sense
of space and vista, there is an obvious difference between his work and
that of Masaccio which also illuminates the distinction between the remarkable
Flemish school of the fifteenth century and the Italian Early Renaissance.
Both were admired as equally 'modern' but they were distinct in medium
and idea. Italy had a long tradition of mural
painting in fresco, which in itself made for a certain largeness of
style, whereas the Netherlandish painter, working in an oil medium on
panel paintings of relatively
small size, retained some of the minuteness of the miniature painter.
Masaccio, indeed, was not a lone innovator but one who developed the fresco
narrative tradition of his great Proto-Renaissance forerunner in Florence,
Giotto di Bondone (1267-1337). See, for instance, the latter's Scrovegni
Chapel Frescoes (c.1303-10, Padua).

Florence had a different orientation also
as a centre of classical learning and philosophic study. The city's intellectual
vigour made it the principal seat of the Renaissance in the fifteenth
century and was an influence felt in every art. Scholars who devoted themselves
to the study and translation of classical texts, both Latin and Greek,
were the tutors in wealthy and noble households that came to share their
literary enthusiasm. This in turn created the desire for pictorial versions
of ancient history and legend. The painter's range of subject was greatly
extended in consequence and he now had further problems of representation
to solve.

In this way, what might have been simply
a nostalgia for the past and a retrograde step in art became a move forward
and an exciting process of discovery. The human body, so long excluded
from fine art painting and medieval
sculpture by religious scruple - except in
the most meagre and unrealistic form - gained a new importance in the
portrayal of the gods, goddesses and heroes of classical myth. Painters
had to become reacquainted with anatomy, to understand the relation
of bone and muscle, the dynamics of movement. In the picture now treated
as a stage instead of a flat plane, it was necessary to explore and make
use of the science of linear perspective. In addition, the example
of classical sculpture was an incentive to combine naturalism with an
ideal of perfect proportion and physical beauty.

Painters and sculptors in their own fashion
asserted the dignity of man as the humanist philosophers did, and evinced
the same thirst for knowledge. Extraordinary indeed is the list of great
Florentine artists of the fifteenth century and, not least extraordinary,
the number of them that practised more than one art or form of expression.

In every way the remarkable Medici
family fostered the intellectual climate and the developments in
the arts that made Florence the mainspring of the Renaissance. The fortune
derived from the banking house founded by Giovanni de' Medici (c.1360-1429),
with sixteen branches in the cities of Europe, was expended on this
promotion of culture, especially by the two most distinguished members
of the family, Cosimo, Giovanni's son (1389-1464), and his grandson
Lorenzo (1448-92), who in their own gifts as men of finance, politics
and diplomacy, their love of books, their generous patronage of the
living and their appreciation of antiques of many kinds, were typical
of the universality that was so much in the spirit of the Renaissance.

The equation of the philosophy of Plato
and Christian doctrine in the academy instituted by Cosimo de' Medici
seems to have sanctioned the division of a painter's activity, as so often
happened, between the religious and the pagan subject. The intellectual
atmosphere the Medici created was an invigorating element that caused
Florence to outdistance neighbouring Siena. Though no other Italian city
of the fifteenth century could claim such a constellation of genius in
art, those that came nearest to Florence were the cities likewise administered
by enlightened patrons. Ludovico Gonzaga ( 1414-78) Marquess of
Mantua, was a typical Renaissance ruler in his aptitude for politics and
diplomacy, in his encouragement of humanist learning and in the cultivated
taste that led him to form a great art collection and to employ Andrea
Mantegna (1431-1506) as court painter.

Of similar calibre was Federigo Montefeltro,
Duke of Urbino. Like Ludovico Gonzaga, he had been a pupil of the celebrated
humanist teacher, Vittorino da Feltre, whose school at Mantua combined
manly exercises with the study of Greek and Latin authors and inculcated
the humanist belief in the all-round improvement possible to man. At the
court of Urbino, which set the standard of good manners and accomplishment
described by Baldassare Castiglione in Il Cortigiano, the Duke entertained
a number of painters, principal among them the great Piero della Francesca
(1420-92).

The story of Renaissance painting after
Masaccio brings us first to the pious Fra
Angelico (c.1400-55), born earlier but living much longer. Something
of the Gothic style remains in his work but the conventual innocence,
which is perhaps what first strikes the eye, is accompanied by a mature
firmness of line and sense of structure. This is evident in such paintings
of his later years as The Adoration of the Magi now in the Louvre
and the frescoes illustrating the lives of St. Stephen and St. Lawrence,
frescoed in the Vatican for Pope Nicholas V in the late 1440s. They show
him to have been aware of, and able to turn to advantage, the changing
and broadening attitude of his time. See also his series of paintings
on The Annunciation
(c.1450, San Marco Museum). His pupil Benozzo Gozzoli (c.1421-97) nevertheless
kept to the gaily decorative colour and detailed incident of the International
Gothic style in such a work as the panoramic Procession of the Magi
in the Palazzo Riccardi, Florence, in which he introduced the equestrian
portrait of Lorenzo de' Medici.

Nearer to Fra Angelico than Masaccio was
Fra Filippo Lippi (c.1406-69),
a Carmelite monk in early life and a protege of Cosimo de' Medici, who
looked indulgently on the artist's various escapades, amorous and otherwise.
Fra Filippo, in the religious subjects he painted exclusively, both in
fresco and panel, shows the tendency to celebrate the charm of an idealized
human type that contrasts with the urge of the fifteenth century towards
technical innovation. He is less distinctive in purely aesthetic or intellectual
quality than in his portrayal of the Madonna as an essentially feminine
being. His idealized model, who was slender of contour, dark-eyed and
with raised eyebrows, slightly retrousse nose and small mouth, provided
an iconographical pattern for others. A certain wistfulness of expression
was perhaps transmitted to his pupil, Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510).

In Botticelli's paintings, much of the
foregoing development of the Renaissance is summed up. He excelled in
that grace of feature and form that Fra Filippo had aimed to give and
of which Botticelli's contemporary, Domenico
Ghirlandaio (1449-94), also had his delightful version in frescoes
and portraits. He interpreted in a unique pictorial fashion the neo-Platonism
of Lorenzo de Medici's humanist philosophers. The network of ingenious
allegory in which Marsilio Ficino, the tutor of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco
de' Medici (a cousin of Lorenzo the Magnificent), sought to demonstrate
a relation between Grace, Beauty and Faith, has equivalent subtlety in
La Primavera (c.1482-3,
Uffizi) and the Birth of Venus (c.1484-6, Uffizi) executed for
Lorenzo's villa. The poetic approach to the classics of Angelo Poliziano,
also a tutor of the Medici family, may be seen reflected in Botticelli's
art. Though his span of life extended into the period of the High Renaissance,
he still represents the youth of the movement in his delight in clear
colours and exquisite natural detail. Perhaps in the wistful beauty of
his Aphrodite something may be found of the nostalgia for the Middle Ages
towards which, eventually, when the fundamentalist monk Savonarola
denounced the Medici and all their works, he made his passionate gesture
of return.

The nostalgia as well as the purity of
Botticelli's linear design, as yet unaffected by emphasis on light and
shade, made him the especial object of Pre-Raphaelite admiration in the
nineteenth century. But, as in other Renaissance artists, there was an
energy in him that imparted to his linear rhythms a capacity for intense
emotional expression as well as a gentle refinement. The distance of the
Renaissance from the inexpressive calm of the classical period as represented
by statues of Venus or Apollo, resides in this difference of spirit or
intention even if unconsciously revealed. The expression of physical energy
which at Florence took the form, naturally enough, of representations
of male nudes, gives an
unclassical violence to the work of the painter and sculptor Antonio
Pollaiuolo (1426-98). Pollaiuolo was one of the first artists to dissect
human bodies in order to follow exactly the play of bone, muscle and tendon
in the living organism, with such dynamic effects as appear in the muscular
tensions of struggle in his bronze of Hercules and Antaeus (Florence,
Bargello) and the movements of the archers in his painting The Martyrdom
of St. Sebastian (NG, London). The same sculptural emphasis can be
seen in frescoes by the lesser-known but more influential artist Andrea
del Castagno (c.1420-57).

Luca
Signorelli (c.1441-1523), though associated with the Umbrian School
as the pupil of Piero della Francesca, was strongly influenced by the
Florentine Pollaiuolo in his treatment of the figure. With less anatomical
subtlety but with greater emphasis on outward bulges and striations of
muscle and sinew, he too aimed at dynamic effects of movement, obtaining
them by sudden explosions of gesture.

It was a direction of effort that seems
to lead naturally and inevitably to the achievement of Michelangelo (1475-1654).
Though there are manifest differences in mode of thought and style between
his Last Lodgement in the Sistine Chapel and Signorelli's version in the
frescoes in Orvieto Cathedral, they have in common a formidable energy.
It was a quality which made them appear remote from the balance and harmony
of classical art. Raphael (1483-1520) was much nearer to the classical
spirit in the Apollo of his Parnassus in the Vatican and the Galatea in
the Farnesina, Rome. One of the most striking of the regional contrasts
of the Renaissance period is between the basically austere and intellectual
character of art in Tuscany in the rendering of the figure as compared
with the sensuous languor of the female
nudes painted in Venice by Giorgione (1477-1510) and Titian (c.1485-1576).
(For more, please see: Venetian
Portrait Painting c.1400-1600.) Though even in this respect Florentine
science was not without its influence. The soft gradation of shadow devised
by Leonardo da Vinci to give subtleties of modelling was adopted by Giorgione
and at Parma by Antonio Allegri da Correggio (1489-1534) as a means of
heightening the voluptuous charm of a Venus, an Antiope or an Io.

The Renaissance masters not only made a
special study of anatomy but also of perspective, mathematical proportion
and, in general, the science of space. The desire of the period for knowledge
may partly account for this abstract pursuit, but it held more specific
origins and reasons. Linear perspective was firstly the study of architects
in drawings and reconstructions of the classical types of building they
sought to revive. In this respect, the great architect Filippo Brunelleschi
(1377-1446) was a leader in his researches in Rome. In Florence he gave
a demonstration of perspective in a drawing of the piazza of San Giovanni
that awakened the interest of other artists, his friend Masaccio in particular.
The architect Leon Battista
Alberti (1404-72) was another propagator of the scientific theory.
Painters concerned with a picture as a three-dimensional illusion realized
the importance of perspective as a contribution to the effect of space
- an issue which involved techniques of illusionistic mural painting such
as quadratura, first practised by Mantegna at the Ducal Palace
in Mantua in his Camera degli Sposi frescoes (1465-74).

Paolo Uccello (1397-1475) was one of the
earl promoters of the science at Florence. His painting of the Battle
of San Romano in the National Gallery, London, with its picturesqueness
of heraldry, is a beautifully calculated series of geometric forms and
mathematical intervals. Even the broken lances on the ground seem so arranged
as to lead the eye to a vanishing point. His foreshortening of a knight
prone on the ground was an exercise of skill that Andrea Mantegna was
to emulate. It was Mantegna who brought the new science of art to Venice.

In the complex interchange of abstract
and mathematical ideas and influences, Piero della Francesca stands out
as the greatest personality. Though an Umbrian, born in the little town
of Borgo San Sepolcro, he imbibed the atmosphere of Florence and Florentine
art as a young man, when he worked there with the Venetian-born Domenico
Veneziano (c.1410-61). Domenico had assimilated the Tuscan style and
had his own example of perspective to give, as in the beautiful Annunciation
now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, though Piero probably gained
his scientific attitude towards design from the three pioneers of research,
Brunelleschi, Alberti and Donatello (1386-1466), the greatest sculptor
in quattrocento Florence.

Classical in ordered design and largeness
of conception, but without the touch of antiquarianism that is to be found
in Mantegna, Piero was an influence on many painters. His interior perspectives
of Renaissance architecture which added an element of geometrical abstraction
to his figure compositions were well taken note of by his Florentine contemporary,
Andrea del Castagno
(c.1420-57). A rigidly geometrical setting is at variance with and yet
emphasizes the flexibility of human expression in the Apostles in Andrea's
masterpiece The Last Supper in the Convent of Sant' Apollonia,
Florence. Antonello da
Messina (1430-1479) who introduced the Flemish technique of oil painting
to Venice brought also a sense of form derived from Piero della Francesca
that in turn was stimulating in its influence on Giovanni
Bellini (1430-1516), diverting him from a hard linear style like that
of Mantegna and contributing to his mature greatness as leader of Venetian
Painting, and the teacher of Giorgione and Titian.

Of the whole wonderful development of the
Italian Renaissance in the fifteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo
were the heirs. The universality of the artist was one crucial
aspect of the century. Between architect, sculptor, painter, craftsman
and man of letters there had been no rigid distinction. Alberti was architect,
sculptor, painter, musician, and writer of treatises on the theory of
the arts. Andrea del Verrocchio
(1435-88), an early master of Leonardo, is described as a goldsmith, painter,
sculptor and musician: and in sculpture could vie with any master. But
Leonardo and Michelangelo displayed this universality to
a supreme degree. Leonardo, the engineer, the prophetic inventor, the
learned student of nature in every aspect, the painter of haunting masterpieces,
has never failed to excite wonder. See, for instance, his Virgin
of the Rocks (1483-5, Louvre, Paris) and Lady
with an Ermine (1490, Czartoryski Museum, Krakow). As much may
be said of Michelangelo, the sculptor, painter, architect and poet. The
crown of Florentine achievement, they also mark the decline of the city's
greatness. Rome, restored to splendour by ambitious popes after long decay,
claimed Michelangelo, together with Raphael, to produce the monumental
conceptions of High
Renaissance painting: two absolute masterpieces being Michelangelo's
Genesis
fresco (1508-12, Sistine Chapel ceiling, Rome), which includes
the famous Creation
of Adam (1511-12), and Raffaello Sanzio's Sistine
Madonna (1513-14, Gemaldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden). In addition,
both artists were appointed architect-in-charge of the new St
Peter's Basilica in Rome, a symbol of the city's transformation from
medieval to Renaissance city. Leonardo, absorbed in his researches was
finally lured away to France. Yet in these great men the genius of Florence
lived on. For the story of the Late Renaissance, during the period (c.1530-1600)
- a period which includes the greatest Venetian
altarpieces as well as Michelangelo's magnificent but foreboding Last
Judgment fresco on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel - see: Mannerist
Painting in Italy. See also: Titian
and Venetian Colour Painting c.1500-76.

Best Collections
of Renaissance Art

The following Italian galleries have major
collections of Renaissance paintings or sculptures.